Marketing – How to get TONS of sellers and buyers to call you!
One of the most frequent questions I get from other investors is, “Jim, how do you find motivated sellers, and how are you finding so many buyers?” In this blog I’ll answer both of those questions by giving you some tangible answers that you can literally put into action TODAY to start ramping up your marketing machine. But before I do that, I think it’s only fair that you know that I’m qualified to give such advice…so, here are last week’s stats in my business:
Total calls from sellers last week: 131
Total calls from buyers last week: 142
Hits on my website (for selling) 144
That’s a TON of calls! Before you can get all excited about getting a ton of calls or hits on your website, you absolutely MUST understand the value of marketing. Here it is:
Marketing —à Leads (calls, emails, form submissions from website etc…)
Leads—à Prospects (i.e. you’ve weeded out the non-motivated sellers)
Prospects —à Deals
Deals —à Money!
As you can see, it all starts with marketing! Marketing is the KEY to any successful business…yes, any business. Hopefully now I’ve shown you two things: 1, the value and importance of marketing, and 2, why I’m qualified to give advice on the matter. On this blog, we’re going to talk about how to find LOTS of motivated sellers…
My Three Favorite Ways to Find Sellers:
1 – Direct Mail. By far, direct mail is my favorite. It’s easy to turn on and off, it’s easy to measure the response, you can target your recipients…it’s awesome. The only downside is that until it results in a deal for you, it’s pretty expensive. Here’s a breakdown: 250 letters (including postage) cost about $250. The list for 250 names and addresses will cost anywhere from zero dollars to another $200, depending on the list and the source. Then, if you have an answering service take your calls, you’re going to pay $1/minute for them to take the call. Then you have to have a VA (Virtual Assistant) call all the leads back to get the rest of the info. All totaled, it costs me about $450 – $500 for every 250 letters that I send out.
I know that sounds expensive, but let’s run the numbers. Those 250 letters will result in about 65 calls. 65 calls will create about 10-20 leads (yes, it varies that much). Out of 10-20 leads from direct mail, I usually close one deal. My profit per deal ranges from $3,000 – $90,000, so obviously it’s worth doing, assuming that I have the follow-up systems in place to take a deal from “lead” status to closing.
2 – FSBO’s. There is a RIDICULOUS amount of “For Sale By Owner” (fsbo) leads all over the internet and local newspapers! If you are dead-broke, can’t afford to pay for anything, and don’t have the credibility to bring in referrals, then get ahold of a good script, calls some fsbo’s, and you’ll have a deal in no time if you call a decent number of ads. Now, there are two downsides to calling fsbo’s…1, it takes lots of time. 2, it’s dis-heartening and discouraging for newbies because of all the rejection they face from NON-motivated sellers. Nonetheless, it’s a great source of deals. If you give me a big enough stack of FSBO’s to keep me busy calling for one solid hour, I will ABSOLUTELY come up with a deal that, once marketed properly to sell, will net at least $5,000. If you don’t believe me, get me a stack of leads to call and I’ll prove you wrong…every timeJ
Some of the best places to find these houses are www.craigslist.com, (for rent and for sale sections), www.homesbyowner.com, www.fsbo.com, www.forsalebyowner.com, and of course your local newspapers.
3 – Referrals. What do you think is the #1 key to successfully getting referrals on a regular basis? Without a doubt, the #1 way to get lots of referrals is to provide extreme value to your clients and ensure that they are 100% satisfied with you, what you had to offer in the deal, and with how you treated them during the process. Assuming that you treat people well and maintain a good name in your community, you will do 2-6 deals every year from referrals within your first 2 years of doing business. It’s free marketing!
